ShadowKamui:The point is no lawyer is touching this pro-bono except the anti-death penalty ones, there's not going to be anything flashy to try and make a name for yourself otherwise.

there are a lot of anti-death penalty folks, and that is always flashy. I don't know... I can see it. 19 year old kid, dominating older brother, some other factors. I mean, there's nothing to hang your hat on, but a decent lawyer might get him an extra decade or two of life, or maybe some amenities.

IRQ12:People really amuse me when they think that they *need* any statement or evidence from him at all. Without the crimes at the marathon they have enough, with eye witnesses (to include police), to ship him away for life.I guess if you care about the death penalty, but the officer shooting probably carries the death penalty anyway.

the day you try a case before a judge, you can talk about how well prepared you want to be before you make your case. it's like telling NASA that they only have to do some of the math because everybody knows that mars exists.

People really amuse me when they think that they *need* any statement or evidence from him at all. Without the crimes at the marathon they have enough, with eye witnesses (to include police), to ship him away for life.I guess if you care about the death penalty, but the officer shooting probably carries the death penalty anyway.

the day you try a case before a judge, you can talk about how well prepared you want to be before you make your case. it's like telling NASA that they only have to do some of the math because everybody knows that mars exists.

Of course from a DAs point of view they want everything they can get but to think that his statements are needed to prosecute him is kind of silly. Especially when the tradeoff is being able to asses any connections or threats to come.

IRQ12:People really amuse me when they think that they *need* any statement or evidence from him at all.

It's called police work, in a country where the rule of law applies.

You shouldn't really be amused by this, unless you are ok with the idea of living in a totalitarian state where a despot dictates anyone should be subjected to in spite of evidence, laws and other pesky details.

maggoo:IRQ12: People really amuse me when they think that they *need* any statement or evidence from him at all.

It's called police work, in a country where the rule of law applies.

You shouldn't really be amused by this, unless you are ok with the idea of living in a totalitarian state where a despot dictates anyone should be subjected to in spite of evidence, laws and other pesky details.

i think he meant that we don't need any evidence of statements directly from the suspects mouth- as in, we could not interogate him at all and it would not effect the outcome of the trial because the physical, video and circumstantial evidence and witness statements are so overwhelming that his input does not matter one way or the other

olddinosaur:If he wasn't mirandized before, anything he said may not be admissable.

Cops f*cked up on that one, evidence was already very solid.

Not a lawyer or anything, but used to take some business and personal law classes in college. My recollection may be fuzzy, but I think I recall that the Miranda warning's public safety exception, which I'm pretty sure they used here, allows them to use anything obtained before he was Mirandized if they can successfully argue the exception in court. I suspect the chances of success in that would be high in this case.

thornhill:I get that the Feds were worried that there might be a ticking bomb somewhere, but if you've watched just one episode of Law & Order, then you know that not mirandizing Dzhokhar from the start is going turn the whole thing into a legal train wreck. It's also seems hard to even argue that there could have even been a ticking time bomb scenario given that when he was arrested his whereabouts for the last 24 hours had been mostly accounted for, and that for the better part of the day he was hunkered in boat bleeding. And on top of that, the police ended the lockdown.

It wasn't so much for that, I suspect. It was for other possible issues; such as, the tens of thousands of people who were sure to complain when he didn't get read his rights on the boat because of those same episodes of Law & Order; for the dozens of other people Tsarnaev was going to encounter between arrest and incarceration who would be talking to him in a semi-official capacity and who would not necessarily know his Miranda right status; the fact that he was badly wounded and couldn't be expected to understand his rights at the time of arrest anyway and would need to be re-Mirandized; and a whole host of other legal problems.

Because Tsarnaev was so badly injured when he was caught, reading him his rights was a moot point; the subject has to respond "knowingly and voluntarily" to the rights and so someone can't just blurt them out to a barely conscious body lying on the gurney. Delaying the reading ensures nobody can claim later "Oh, we thought he'd been read his rights, so you can/can't talk to him!" on either side of the case.

Likewise, there is another whole body of case law about statements made to doctors, medics, nurses, etc., and what anyone can say while the subject is under a doctor's care. Is the statement part of his treatment, or just a random comment? Is an officer in the room for safety covered by privilege or not? By not Mirandizing Tsarnaev, and thus keeping all his statements outside legal testimony from the defendant, all these questions don't need to be asked.

Also, if he said "Yeah, we planted the bombs," before he got Mirandized, guess what? They can't use those statements against him. Too bad for them.

jshine:DROxINxTHExWIND: "If anyone can provide this young man with a tenacious, effective defense, it's Miriam Conrad"

I know it sounds crazy, but these reprehensible people are the backbone of our Democracy.

What's reprehensible about providing a suspect with his constitutional rights? If we can't abide by the rule of law, then we have no moral authority to pass judgment anyway. Justice must mean more than an angry mob.

Kind of like how the Watertown police ignored that whole inconvenient 4th Amendment when they sent the storm troopers to force people at gun point out of their houses to be patted down and their houses searched without a warrant or probable cause? I'm pretty sure the Founders had EXACTLY this in mind when they wrote that Amendment; the British did house to house searches without warrants. They didn't want Americans to be subject to this type of intrusion.

FLMountainMan:Defense attorneys are absolutely essential, at least under our current legal system, to keep the government in check and avoid a police state.

****Attorneys in general have been essential for hundreds of years.That's why in "King Henry VI Part Two" one of the group of conspirators with Jack Cade who want to overthrow the crown says the well-known line about the first thing they will do is kill all the lawyers.The line is often misinterpreted as being anti-lawyer, but was Shakespeare's way of saying that lawyers were needed as a way to maintain law and civility, yes, even in the England of the 1400s.

I know it sounds crazy, but these reprehensible people are the backbone of our Democracy.

What's reprehensible about providing a suspect with his constitutional rights? If we can't abide by the rule of law, then we have no moral authority to pass judgment anyway. Justice must mean more than an angry mob.

Kind of like how the Watertown police ignored that whole inconvenient 4th Amendment when they sent the storm troopers to force people at gun point out of their houses to be patted down and their houses searched without a warrant or probable cause? I'm pretty sure the Founders had EXACTLY this in mind when they wrote that Amendment; the British did house to house searches without warrants. They didn't want Americans to be subject to this type of intrusion.

Guy, known to take hostages, disappears in a residential neighborhood. That's probable cause.

Magistrate on the phone, with pre-made warrants in front of him, just needs to write down the address and sign his name. There's your farkin warrant.

IRQ12:<a target="_blank" data-cke-saved-href="<a href=" href="<a href=" http:="" www.fark.com="" users="" pute%20kisses%20like%20a%20man"="" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.3em;">pute kisses like a man : People really amuse me when they think that they *need* any statement or evidence from him at all. Without the crimes at the marathon they have enough, with eye witnesses (to include police), to ship him away for life.I guess if you care about the death penalty, but the officer shooting probably carries the death penalty anyway.

the day you try a case before a judge, you can talk about how well prepared you want to be before you make your case. it's like telling NASA that they only have to do some of the math because everybody knows that mars exists.Of course from a DAs point of view they want everything they can get but to think that his statements are needed to prosecute him is kind of silly. Especially when the tradeoff is being able to asses any connections or threats to come.These aren't bunch of idiots in a small town who are new to this.

I'm fairly sure that shortly after he invoked his rights a federal prosecutor walked into the room with a big smile on his face and said, "Thank you, The Attorney General wouldn't let me seek the death penalty while you were cooperating. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to form a fund raising committee and file to run for a congressional seat from Boston. How does "I got the death penalty for Dzhokhar" sound as a campaign slogan?"

I know it sounds crazy, but these reprehensible people are the backbone of our Democracy.

What's reprehensible about providing a suspect with his constitutional rights? If we can't abide by the rule of law, then we have no moral authority to pass judgment anyway. Justice must mean more than an angry mob.

Kind of like how the Watertown police ignored that whole inconvenient 4th Amendment when they sent the storm troopers to force people at gun point out of their houses to be patted down and their houses searched without a warrant or probable cause? I'm pretty sure the Founders had EXACTLY this in mind when they wrote that Amendment; the British did house to house searches without warrants. They didn't want Americans to be subject to this type of intrusion.

Guy, known to take hostages, disappears in a residential neighborhood. That's probable cause.

Magistrate on the phone, with pre-made warrants in front of him, just needs to write down the address and sign his name. There's your farkin warrant.

Care to go all "4th Amendment! Gub'mit thugs!" on us again?

Fine, give them the pre-made warrant. Keep in mind that, probable cause requires more than simply the wanted criminal disappeared somewhere within a twenty block radius of your house. If that were the standard, every house in any remotely large city could be searched 24/7 as there are criminals all over. The judge almost certainly would require more than just "well, we lost him and would like to search every house anywhere even remotely close to where we lost him". I'm thinking the judge would want a trail leading to the house, a broken window, a blood smear, etc. Just SOMETHING that provides some basis for articulating that they reasonably believe the suspect may be in a given home. You can't search house to house just because you want the guy.

But, a warrant, would have been following the LAW. What they did was to go martial law illegally. They should have went to each door, knocked, identified themselves, and asked for permission to search. If the residents declined, then they could ask a judge for a proper warrant, and then conduct the search properly. What they did was to shove guns in people's faces, force them out of their house while yelling at them, frisk them down roughly, force them out of their own homes, and then conduct a warrant-less search of the premises.

Civil Discourse:Miranda does not stand for the proposition that LEOs must inform a person of their 5th Amendment rights as a prerequisite to all interrogation, rather it is constitutionally required for statements made during an interrogation to be admitted as evidence at trial.

You want to know why? I know exactly why he did it. Dzhokhar, that is, not Tamerlan. I couldn't begin to guess at Tamerlan as he seems to have been a far more complicated and conflicted person. But Dzhokhar's motivation is easy.

Ennui. That's it. Talk to young people. Really talk to them. Hear what they have to say. There's a damn sizable portion of young people who could, right this very second, snap and say "fark it" and go down the same path. Nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with ethnicity or citizenship status. There are tons of young people who could quite literally just decide to knife family members, shoot up schools, plant bombs in crowded areas, and so on. They don't have mental problems. They come as often from good backgrounds as they do from bad ones. They just have ennui. Either they feel too much or not enough, even that doesn't really matter. Eventually some of them just stop caring and stop trying. They all have these odd fantasies. A few of them wind up acting on them. It's an attempt to combat the feeling of being powerless. Even those deemed most likely to succeed are just as likely to want to accomplish anything, especially something so drastic.

It's just disaffected youth. No more, no less. There's nothing special about it and it's not even a new phenomenon. It's been there for ages, we just have this grand ability to communicate nigh-instantly which makes it seem bigger than it really is. There's nothing proactive you can do to stop it. It's going to happen again. All we can do is live with it and maybe next time it won't be as bad. Maybe the next guy will get caught before he has a chance to hurt anyone.

The only thing I find strange at this point is that anyone is surprised or shocked by these happenings. We are a nation of murders, shootings, bombings, and wars. There's more on the way, folks, you should be keenly aware of that by now. If I wind up being a victim I'll hate the pain and the frustration if I survive, but I'm not going to pretend to be surprised about it.